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SLA Undergraduate Student Essay Contest

By SLA Web Guru on May 15, 2012

On behalf of the SLA Executive Committee, I invite you to participate in this year’s Society for Linguistic Anthropology student essay prize competition for the best undergraduate paper in linguistic anthropology. (PLEASE NOTE THAT THE DEADLINE FOR THE GRADUATE PAPER CONTEST WAS EARLIER THIS SPRING. THOSE INTERESTED IN THE GRADUATE PAPER CONTEST SHOULD WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT CONTEST CYCLE IN SPRING 2013) The deadline for the undergraduate contest is June 30. The SLA will award a cash prize of $500, as well as $300 in travel reimbursement for the prize winner, in order to help ensure that they’ll be able to attend the AAA conference and accept their prize in person.
If you are a student who has written a paper that meets the contest guidelines (see below), please consider submitting it!  If you are a faculty member who has read a student paper that you feel is worthy of consideration, please encourage the author to submit it

Society for Linguistic Anthropology Annual Undergraduate Student Essay Competition

The Society for Linguistic Anthropology holds an annual student essay competition at both undergraduate and graduate levels. THIS IS THE UNDERGRADUATE SECTION OF THE CONTEST. In order to be eligible for this award, the entrant must have been an undergraduate student in a degree-granting program when the paper was written; must be the sole author of the paper; and must submit the paper no more than two years after it was written.

The paper must be an original work based on original research conducted by the author.  It will be evaluated on the basis of its clarity, significance to the field, engagement with relevant literatures, and if it makes an original contribution to linguistic anthropological knowledge. At the time of submission for this competition, the paper must not have been published or submitted for publication.

Submissions will be evaluated by a panel of judges.  A prize will be awarded in this category only if a submission of sufficiently high quality is received.  The winner or winners will be announced at the SLA business meeting, which is held during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

Entries must be submitted electronically in either .pdf or .doc format.  They should be sent to Jillian Cavanaugh (SLA Executive Committee Member at Large and organizer of this year’s competition) at  jcavanaugh@brooklyn.cuny.edu by the deadline of June 30.  The cover sheet should include: the title of the paper; the author’s name; the author’s email address; the author’s college or university affiliation; the prize category (undergraduate or graduate) for which the paper is being submitted; and the name of the faculty member who served as the student’s advisor with respect to the writing of the paper.

 

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“Ordinary” language use

By Chad Nilep on April 29, 2012

In “Lesbian bar talk in Shinjuku, Tokyo” Hideko Abe analyzes linguistic behavior in twelve Tokyo bars, showing the various ways in which rezu (lesbians), onabe (‘masculine’ women), and nyuu haafu (transgendered people) construct and claim identity positions through language use. It is a solid analysis of interesting data drawn from Abe’s field work and from media texts.

One passage in particular so drew my attention that I wanted to subject it to a bit more analysis. Abe interviews the manager of a lesbian bar, who she calls A. She notes that the word futsuu (ordinary) is used in complex ways, to describe both heterosexual identities and the ordinary lives of the manager and patrons of her bar.

Minna hontoo ni futsuu no renai o shite iru n desu yo ne. Naimenteki na bubun ga chigau tte yuu ka. Futokutei tasuu no hitobito ni yotte tsukuridasareta imeeji to yuu mono ga, henken o umidashita tte yuu no wa aru to omou. Shinjitsu o wakatte nai to yuu ka. Futsuu no onna no ko demo, rezu baa tte donna tokoro na no ka na, mitai na kanji de kuru shi, kite mireba, a, nan da futsuu no mono nan da mitai na. Onna no ko hitori de mo anshin shite nomi ni kite kuremasu yo. Futsuu no onna no ko mo ippai kimasu. Shufu no hito mo iru shi, kareshi ga iru kedo kuru ko mo imasu shi ne.

‘Lesbians have ordinary love relationships, you know. Internally, we are different. Some people created the image of lesbians as different, which created prejudice, I think. They don’t know the real truth. Ordinary women come here because they’re curious. Once they come, they realize how ordinary we are. Girls can feel comfortable coming here on their own to drink. Lots of ordinary women come here, including housewives and women who have boyfriends.
[Abe 2004, 210-211]

Earlier in her fieldwork Abe was surprised to hear another woman, who she calls C, use the word futsuu to mean heterosexual, “because I thought that the speaker meant that she considered herself and other lesbians not ordinary” (p. 210). In the data quoted above, though, “the speaker characterizes lesbians’ love relationships as futsuu because she wants heterosexuals to be inclusive of her by thinking of her as ordinary” (p. 211). In addition to Abe’s observation about two uses of the word by two different speakers, the shifting meaning of futsuu in A’s speech seem to bear additional analysis.

In her description of bar patrons A uses the word futsuu four times. Twice she uses the phrase futsuu no onna no ko (普通の女の子 “ordinary girls”). This category includes shufu no hito (主婦の人 “housewives”) and kareshi ga iru ko (彼氏がいる子 “kids who have boyfriends”). Thus, like other women Abe interviewed, A uses futsuu no onna no ko to refer to heterosexual women.

Another occurrence of futsuu comes in indirect quoted speech. According to A, when they come to the bar and see what goes on women think, ‘a, nan da futsuu no mono nan da‘ (あっ、なんだ普通のものなんだ。 “Oh, how ordinary it is”).* In this example A says that newcomers to the bar—and in context this seems to include, if not refer exclusively to, heterosexual women—regard the staff and regular customers as futsuu.

The other occurrence of futsuu is translated into English as “Lesbians have ordinary love relationships”. This is a decent translation, as A appears to be talking about the patrons of her bar as well as other people who would identify as part of the same group. The Japanese sentence, “Minna hontoo ni futsuu no renai o shite iru n desu yo ne,” does not explicitly label that group as “lesbian”, however. The sentence could equally be translated as “Everybody really has ordinary romantic relationships, you know.” The key point is that minna (皆 “everyone”) can be understood as having multiple referents. While the most likely immediate reference is everyone in the bar, at the same time the word can mean lesbians generally, women generally, or all people, among other possibilities.

Abe is quite right that A’s use of futsuu functions to include heterosexuals and homosexuals, bar patrons and non-patrons within a broad identity position. The multiple occurrences of the word with slightly shifting reference contribute to the effect.

 

* The word mono most usually refers to non-human objects or to abstract concepts. Sometimes, though, it is used for human beings. Thus the phrase could also be translated as “Oh, how ordinary they are.”

Abe, Hideko. 2004. Lesbian bar talk in Shinjuku, Tokyo. In S. Okamoto and J. Shibamoto Smith (eds.), Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 205-221.

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AAA elections open through 31 May

By Chad Nilep on April 16, 2012

Elections for American Anthropological Association positions, including Association Secretary, Executive Board members, and several committee positions, as well as elections for the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and other sections are open from 15 April until 31 May, 2012. SLA members will elect a Member-at-Large and Secretary/Treasurer for the section.

Members of AAA and SLA can vote by logging in at www.aaanet.org with your online username and password and clicking “Vote Now” from the information page.

The ballot includes information about the candidates for each position. Click “Details” below each candidate’s name.

If you have any technical problems or difficulties, please email elections@aaanet.org for assistance.

Related announcement: AAA and SLA Election Candidates

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AAA and SLA election candidates

By Chad Nilep on April 5, 2012

The May 2012 issue of Anthropology News lists the candidates (PDF here) for association-wide elected positions and for individual sections of the American Anthropological Association. This includes the Society for Linguistic Anthropology.

Association-wide candidates are also listed at the AAA blog, along with links to descriptions of positions and committees.

In case you missed it, here are the candidates for AAA and SLA positions, as listed in Anthropology News. For other sections, please refer to AN directly, or follow the link above to the PDF pages.

SLA

Members-at-Large

  • Alexandre Duchene
  • Shalini Shankar

Secretary/Treasurer

  • Jonathan Rosa
  • Karl F Swinehart

AAA Association-wide elections

AAA Secretary

  • Rani Alexander
  • Margaret Buckner

AAA Executive Board

Cultural Seat
  • A Lynn Bolles
  • Bill Maurer
Student Seat
  • Ryan Harrod
  • Karen G Williams
Undesignated #1
  • Cheryl Mwaria
  • Peter Neal Peregrine
Undesignated #4
  • Kathleen Musante Dewalt
  • Rayna Rapp

Nominations Committee

Practicing/Professional Seat
  • Stephen Edward Nash
  • Sharon M Stratton
Minority Seat
  • Whitney Battle-Baptiste
  • Kimberly Eison Simmons

Committee on Ethics

Practicing/Professional Seat
  • Gregory J Borgstede
  • Neely Myers
Undesignated #1
  • Christine Hegel-Cantarella
  • Christopher T Nelson

Committee on the Gender Equity in Anthropology

Practicing/Professional Seat
  • Carole McDavid
  • Sarah Ono
Undesignated #5
  • Heather Levi
  • Marcia Ochoa

Committee for Human Rights

Undesignated #2
  • Robert Lewis Clark
  • Tricia Redeker-Hepner
Undesignated #3
  • Eva Friedlander
  • K Anne Pyburn

Committee on Minority Issues in Anthropology

Undesignated #3
  • Elizabeth Chin
  • Jennifer D Heung
Undesignated #4
  • Flordeliz T Bugarin
  • Mayanthi L Fernando

Committee on Public Policy

Undesignated #7
  • Alexander A Bauer
  • Susan B Hyatt

Labor Relations Committee

Undesignated #1
  • Catherine Koehler
  • John R Roby
Undesignated #2
  • Brian McKenna
  • Christine J Walley
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Truth and narrative

By Chad Nilep on April 1, 2012

Once again, I’m thinking through connections between two recently discussed ideas. Last month, it was academics on Wikipedia; today it’s relationships between fact and story telling. Ethan Zuckerman’s recent ruminations on activism and journalism provide a summary and synthesis of one set of ideas, and a piece Michael Wilson contributed to the New York Times’ City Room at about the same time provides the other.

Fact rings false

Wilson describes reactions to a scene in the television drama “Mad Men” that draws from a 1966 New York Times article. In the TV series, set at an advertising agency in 1966, civil rights protesters have water dropped on them from the offices of the Young and Rubicam advertising agency, high above the sidewalk where they are picketing. When the protesters go up to the office to demand an apology, one comments, “And they call us savages.”

Television critics have apparently panned the scene, and particularly the “savages” line. But according to Wilson, “Mad Men” producer Matthew Weiner and his fellow writers based the scene closely on an article in the 28 May 1966 edition of the Times. The story describes protesters at the Office of Economic Opportunity being heckled by Young &  Rubicam executives, having water dropped on them, and demanding an apology in the Y&R office. Times reporter John Kifner happened to be on the scene, and his story quotes Vivian Harris as saying, “And they call us savages.”

Despite the 2012 television script’s adherence to the 1966 newspaper article, television critic Mike Hale insists, “It [the 'savages' line] just rings so false.” Another critic, Matt Zoller Seitz, similarly tells Wilson, “It’s good to know that all that actually happened, but it’s still a terrible line in context of the scene.”

I found the interplay of historical fact and artistic verisimilitude interesting. Critic Hale suggests that the Mad Men line is “false” even though it uses the same location, the same advertising agency, and even the same words reported in the 1966 New York Times article. There is no suggestion that the Times article was false or inaccurate, but what was presumably ‘true’ for newspaper readers is nonetheless ‘false’ for television viewers.

Ethics of attention

Zuckerman’s piece synthesizes a larger debate about fact and ‘truth’ in media. He starts with Mike Daisey, a story teller and monologist whose “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” and more specifically the version of the story excerpted on the radio program “This American Life” has garnered a great deal of attention among journalists, the blogosphere, and social media. Daisey’s monologue tells of a trip he took to Shenzen, China, to find where the Apple computer products he loves are made, and describes brutal working conditions at the factory. It has since come out that the monologue mixes Daisey’s actual experiences in Shenzen with second-hand stories from other parts of China and with fictional elements. This American Life has published a “Retraction”, an episode  in which reporter Rob Schmidtz analyzes the factual and the fictional elements of Daisey’s story and program host Ira Glass confronts the story teller about presenting fictional elements as though they were reportage.

Ethan Zuckerman connects Daisey’s story with the “Gay Girl in Damascus” blog and the “Kony 2012″ video, among other recent events. “A Gay Girl in Damascus” purported to be the daily weblog of woman activist in Syria who suddenly went missing in June 2011. It was later learned that the blogger was actually Tom McMaster, an American man who created an alter-ego to draw attention to the crisis in Syria (though some argue he did it more to draw attention to himself).

“Kony 2012″ is a video posted to YouTube by a group called Invisible Children on 5 March 2012 and viewed by more than 100 million people. It describes Joseph Kony, leader of the Lords Resistance Army in northern Uganda from the 1980s until 2006 and currently a fugitive wanted in connection with war crimes. Unlike Daisey or McMaster, Invisible Children is  not accused of fabricating the details of its video. However, they have been criticized for oversimplifying their story in a way that may provide false impressions. For example, it is not clear from the video that Kony fled Uganda in 2006. The video is also criticized for placing Americans at its center and not presenting the voices of Ugandans.

Zuckerman brings together these incidents to encourage discussion and thought about the ethics of attracting attention.

We’ve seen a rise in the ability to create media and advocate for your cause and your viewpoint over the past decade. And there’s been a massive rise in content available to all of us – and an accompanying rise in ability to choose what we pay attention to – over the past two decades. The result is an increasingly fierce battle for attention.
…
With stories like Daisey’s and Kony 2012, the conversation switches from the practical question of seizing attention to the ethical questions of attention.

Zuckerman encourages readers to think about what is fair and unfair in drawing attention to a story, including how much simplification or alteration of facts is acceptable.

Truth, falsity, and genre

All of this has me reflecting on the relationship between narrative and ‘truth’ – a word that I think warrants scare quotes. Moreover, I find myself thinking about the nature of ‘truth’ in different domains.

The oft-expressed observation that fiction can be a means of addressing ‘deeper truth’ shows that there may be multiple ways of thinking about truth even within a relatively orthodox worldview. The cases summarized above, I think, reveal tensions between competing standards.

For critic Mike Hale a fictional story needs to feel believable, a feeling that does not depend on adherence to recorded events. Journalists, on the other hand, are expected to report events accurately, with the framing of events and ideas sometimes addressed as an ethical question.

For storyteller Mike Daisey, combining factual and fictitious elements is an appropriate use of “the tools of theater and memoir” to make people care about real events. Daisey says, “I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it isn’t true.” Producer Ira Glass, in contrast, asks Daisey whether his theatrical performance shouldn’t carry a warning label “so that the audience in the theater knows that this isn’t strictly speaking a work of truth.”

For the producers of Kony 2012, the film is a useful entrance to the ‘ladder of engagement’, a series of steps by which an individual becomes aware of, then informed about, and finally active around a political or social cause. For many of the video’s critics, though, its over-simplification of events in the creation of an engaging narrative is a form of untruth.

[Hat tip to Alex Enkerli, who brought Ethan Zuckerman's essay to my attention, and to John McIntyre, who pointed me to Michael Wilson's article.]

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Calls for papers at LINGANTH

By Chad Nilep on March 14, 2012

With abstracts for the 2012 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting coming due soon, various SLA members have sent out calls for papers. Subscribers to LINGANTH, the linguistic anthropology distributed email list, may have missed some of these calls, and non-subscribers may be missing out. Anyone interested can check out the LINGANTH archives hosted by LINGUIST List* (though you will need a free log-in to view the callers’ email addresses).

Recent calls include:

[UPDATE 21 March, two more calls]

[UPDATE 24 March]

[UPDATE 27 March]

[UPDATE 3 April]

Also remember the main SLA call for submissions, AAA 2012 and the SLA call for application/registration waivers recently announced here.

And for CFP lagniappe:

Other calls for papers? You can send them to LINGANTH, and let us know by mail or through the comments below if you’d like them listed here.

*Speaking of LINGUIST List, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the annual quest for donations to support this free service, this year labeled “LingQuest”, is going on now.

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Wikipedia and the Academy

By Chad Nilep on March 12, 2012

Two recently published pieces have me reflecting on Wikipedia and the role scholars can play in the project. The first was Barbara Johnstone’s (2011) “Making Pittsburghese”, which we mentioned on the SLA facebook page last month after Jenny Cheshire summarized it at Linguistics Research Digest. The second was Timothy Messer-Kruse’s opinion piece, “The ‘undue weight’ of truth on Wikipedia”, which appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Johnstone’s evaluation of Wikipedia is mostly positive, while Messer-Kruse’s is quite negative.

Johnstone’s article describes the treatment of “Pittsburghese” – a linguistic variety that local people associate with Pittsburgh – in local newspapers, an online forum, a website called “Pittsburghese.com” and the Wikipedia page Pittsburgh English. As Johnstone describes it, newspaper articles about local ways of talking have tended to favor ‘man on the street’ type reporting, with local residents as a primary source of knowledge. One academic, University of Pittsburgh instructor Robert Parslow, was quoted in several articles from the 1960s and 70s, and academics have been quoted since then, though their claims to knowledge are usually not privileged as authoritative but treated as equivalent to the knowledge of other local people.

When Johnstone and Dan Baumgardt significantly re-wrote the Wikipedia entry for Pittsburgh English in 2006, they expected to face resistance from other contributors to the site. What they found, however, was that their new version, citing a wealth of sociolinguistic studies, was easily accepted. “That article has since been edited,” Johnstone says, “but the editing has only made it more technical and limited participation rights in the editing process to people familiar with the relevant scholarly literature.” In contrast to newspapers, which seem to put a premium on personal experience and ‘authenticity’, it is Wikipedia that appears to value technical expertise and the published record. Johnstone notes, “Ironically, the voice of ordinary Pittsburghers – unless they are linguists or can cite the literature of sociolinguistics and dialectology – is even less present [on Wikipedia] than it was in the least interactive of media, the pre-internet print newspaper report” (2011: 12).

Timothy Messer-Kruse’s experience with Wikipedia has received a relatively wide airing. In addition to his piece in The Chronicle, he has discussed his experiences on the Talk of the Nation and On the Media radio programs, and associate editor Rebecca Rosen has written about it at The Atlantic.

Messer-Kruse, an historian and an expert on the 1886 Haymarket Riots, “decided to experiment with editing one particularly misleading assertion chiseled into the Wikipedia article” Haymarket affair, according to his Chronicle piece. As of January 2009* the Wikipedia article said, “The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing” that led to the death of eight police officers and numerous civilians. Yet the trial lasted six weeks and featured ground-breaking evidence, including one of the first uses of chemical forensics in a US court case.

Messer-Kruse changed the Wikipedia article to reflect his knowledge of the case. Within ten minutes, though, another editor removed the additions, calling them “good faith but wholly unsourced revisions”. On various Wikipedia editorial pages Messer-Kruse pointed to primary sources from the trial supporting his version of affairs, and referred to his own published articles. Other contributors argued, though, that Wikipedia articles are meant to reflect the majority view of published sources, even when that view may be inaccurate. As Wikipedia contributor Gwen Gale wrote at the time, “If most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that.”

In the On the Media interview aired this week Messer-Kruse noted, “[Wikipedia has] a culture that you need to be persistent. You need to suggest changes and if they’re rejected you need to go back at it again.” He is not the first to note that Wikipedia has its own particular culture (compare Amichai-Hamburger et al. 2008; Lam et al. 2011, inter alia), one that tends to discourage many people from contributing, including many whose knowledge or expertise could improve the online encyclopedia. Yet Johnstone’s experience suggests that expert knowledge is appreciated, at least when offered on Wikipedia’s own, sometimes prickly, terms.

Messer-Kruse argued at On the Media, “There are some types of information which simply don’t suit themselves to crowd-sourcing, and I would say that historical scholarship is one of those.” Yet Johnstone’s experience with the Pittsburgh English page shows that simple crowd-sourcing of data is not what Wikipedia is doing. As The Atlantic’s Rosen points out, what was at issue in editing “Haymarket affair” was not empirical data but scholarly interpretation. By Messer-Kruse’s own account, the ‘wrong’ interpretation – that the prosecutor did not tie the defendants to the bombing – has been accepted wisdom for more than a century. “The process of how history is taught and revised over time is a slow one, whether in a book, online, or in people’s minds,” says Rosen. “If Wikipedia hesitated to change its article ahead of the scholarly consensus, that is an artifact of academia’s own inability to quickly adopt a new consensus, not a failing of Wikipedia.”

 

*This or similar wording remained until 2012, but has recently been changed.

Amichai-Hamburger,Yair, Naama Lamdan, Rinat Madiel & Tsahi Hayat. 2008. Personality characteristics of Wikipedia members. CyberPsychology & Behavior 11(6), 679-681.

Johnstone, Barbara. 2011. Making Pittsburghese: Communication technology, expertise, and the discursive construction of a regional dialect. Language & Communication 31, 3-15.

Lam, Shyong (Tony) K., Anuradha Uduwage, Zhenhua Dong, Shilad Sen, David R. Musicant, Loren Terveen & John Riedl. 2011. WP:Clubhouse?: An exploration of Wikipedia’s gender imbalance. In Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, 1-10. Mountain View, CA: ACM.

Messer-Kruse, Timothy. 12 February 2012. The ‘undue weight’ of truth on Wikipedia. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Rosen, Rebecca. 16 February 2012. Does Wikipedia have an accuracy problem? The Atlantic.

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SLA Call for Application/Registration Waivers

By SLA Web Guru on March 1, 2012

The SLA is calling for applications for registration waivers for participants in next year’s Annual Meetings in San Francisco. The SLA will have one waiver to allocate and can compete for additional waivers if they become available.

The AAA’s registration waiver program provides registration and membership fee waivers for qualified scholars. Qualifying scholars are: 1) individuals, regardless of academic degree, who bring a perspective to Meetings valued by the nominating Section; and 2) individuals asked to participate in a proposed event or Invited Session sponsored by your Section. Qualifying scholars may be employed outside the United States or Canada as practicing or university-based anthropologists in any of the discipline’s four main subfields (archaeology, sociocultural, biological, linguistic) but they cannot be employed as practicing or university-based anthropologists in the United States or Canada. Qualifying scholars need not be current AAA members.

To apply, please send the following information to Jocelyn Ahlers, SLA Program Committee Chair (jahlers@csusm.edu), no later than March 21, 2012.
1) a description of the proposed Section-sponsored or Section-invited session;
2) the name, affiliation, phone number, work address, and email contact information for the qualifying scholar(s) nominated to receive the Section’s waiver;
3) a short description of the scholar’s proposed role in the Section Invited Session or Section-sponsored event;
4) and her or his credentials and qualifications (i.e., non-anthropologist, community-based scholar, international scholar, etc).

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Gaelic-medium education outcomes in Scotland – Stuart Dunmore

By Chad Nilep on February 28, 2012

 

[The following is a guest post by Stuart Dunmore, Soillse PhD Candidate at the University of Edinburgh.]

The future of the Gaelic language here in Scotland is a matter of considerable uncertainty. While it was the first language of the Kingdom of Scotland (Alba) when the country was formed in the medieval era, Gaelic has receded in geographical and demographic terms over the centuries, withdrawing further north and west under the influence of the Scots language and, later, English. The results of the 2001 UK national census revealed that 58,652 people over the age of three reported the ability to speak Gaelic in Scotland, amounting to less than 1.5% of the total population, with approximately 45% of all reported Gaelic speakers now living outside of the Highlands and Islands (PDF)

Many Gaelic speakers now live in urban contexts in central Scotland, including the major cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, although nowhere here do their proportions exceed 1.5% of the local population. Even in the Western Isles (Na h-Eileanan Siar) which have traditionally been regarded as the heartlands of Gaelic language and culture, language shift to English continues apace. Gaelic language planners, academics and activists are currently awaiting the publication of the results of last year’s (2011) national census, although a further decline is widely expected. Gaelic speakers therefore constitute a minority (or ‘minoritised’) linguistic community in modern Scotland.

As has been widely documented in the sociolinguistic and anthropological literatures, minority language cultures cross the world are struggling in the early-21st century to maintain and revitalise their traditional modes of communication and culture in the face of language shift to more ‘powerful’, majority language varieties.

Minoritised cultures in economically developed, urbanised western societies are no exception in this regard. In many instances, education has come to form a significant, if not the central focus of language revitalisation efforts, and in contexts as diverse as Friesland, Hawaii, Wales, Ireland, New Zealand and the Basque Country (to name only a few) the use of a minoritised language as the medium of instruction in primary and secondary education has been seen as a vital means of transmitting that language to new generations of speakers.

Some sociolinguists have cautioned against an over-reliance on the school as a tool for revitalising endangered languages and cultures, however. Joshua Fishman (2001) in particular stresses that school-based revitalisation initiatives will inevitably fail, unless the endangered language can also function as a living medium in society at large, above and beyond the domain of formal education. The danger is that the school may become an environment of (partial) language acquisition alone, while failing to provide any measure of socialisation into habitual use of the language, or into any of the sociocultural norms traditionally associated with it.

Nettle & Romaine (2000) emphasise that the transmission of endangered languages in the home, secured through ‘bottom-up’ initiatives at the community level, is the most crucial goal of language maintenance, rather than (as is often assumed) persuading policy-makers and governments to act on behalf of the threatened language.

Similarly Fishman (1991) stresses that even where official provisions for minoritised languages have been attained (as is the case in, for example, Scotland, Wales and Ireland) they must be accompanied, supported and re-enforced by habitual use in the home and natural, inter-generational transmission. Provision at the official level within the spheres of education, work, the media and public services will do nothing for the minoritised language that has not been reproduced organically in the home.

At least, that’s the theory.

Gaelic-medium education (henceforward ‘GME’) in which the majority of taught material is delivered through the medium of Gaelic, began in Scotland in 1985. GME grew quickly through the late 1980s and 1990s, and is now established, chiefly at primary level (ages 4-11) in throughout the country. GME is generally delivered in ‘units’ – Gaelic-medium classes within English-medium schools – and provision at secondary level (11-18) is relatively sparse. Furthermore, staff shortages and the failure to recruit sufficient numbers of teachers qualified to teach through Gaelic, have been seen as a threat to the very survival of GME. It is seen as a matter of regret that the potential to secure a fully bilingual generation has gone largely unrealised, due in part to the lack of enough teachers to sustain GME even in the rather limited capacity it currently occupies (MacKinnon 2007)

In recent years debate regarding Gaelic language policy, has, to a significant degree, focused on the importance of developing GME in Scotland. Given this, as well as the limitations of and challenges facing GME generally and the theoretical literature I have referred to, my PhD research is directed at uncovering the mid- to longer-term impact that GME may have on the language practices, ideologies and attitudes of adults who received GME in the first 8-10 years of its existence in Scotland.

Relatively little research appears to have been done on the life trajectories of adults who received a bilingual or immersion education (although see Woolard 2007 for a seminal example from the Catalan context). The focus of my PhD research is therefore to determine the longer-term effects that the bilingual classroom has on such individuals’ relationship to the minoritised language, after formal education is fully completed. What sets of beliefs about the Gaelic language do former GME students profess having embarked on adult life? What role, if any, does it play in their day-to-day lives, and sense of self? And how do these ideological and affective stances impact upon their actual language practices, and upon future prospects for language maintenance and the transmission of Gaelic to future generations?

A crucial first stage in my methodology was delineating the informant cohort and target group for my research. As I have pointed out, Gaelic-medium education expanded quickly in its first decade. For instance, while there were only 24 people enrolled in GME in the academic year 1985-86 (people who will be 31-32 years old in 2012) there were 1,258 in GME by 1994-95 (all of whom will be 22 or over this year).

Since determining prospects for the intergenerational transmission of Gaelic is central to my research aims, I’m limiting my pool of informants to people who are 25 and over, and therefore closer to the national average age for childbirth (c.29). The overall number of former-GME students in this particular cohort (25+) is 614, scattered throughout Scotland, the UK, and in some cases much further afield. I’m trying various things to make contact with these potential participants, including using various social media, as well as more traditional ‘snowballing’ techniques and word-of-mouth survey dissemination.

To approach my principal research questions I am employing a dual methodology, combining an online bilingual questionnaire, which is directed at uncovering language practices and language attitudes, with a number of semi-structured, qualitative interviews. It is hoped that an in-depth analysis of both quantitative data from questionnaires, and fine-grained, discursive data from interviews will allow me to address these issues in more depth, and provide a nuanced, detailed and instructive set of data on Gaelic language attitudes, ideologies and usage among former GME students.

Crucially, the possibility for communication to continue in either Gaelic or English is made clear at all points of contact with potential informants. Previous sociolinguistic and anthropological studies of Scottish Gaelic have suggested that researchers’ choice to conduct research through the medium of English alone serves to increase the hegemony of the language.

To this juncture, comparable numbers of questionnaires have been returned in Gaelic as in English, and most interviews have been carried out in Gaelic. I have conducted a number of face-to-face interviews with former GME students in locations throughout the country, and hope soon to arrange telephone interviews with participants now based further afield, from the south of England to the western United States and even Australia. It will be instructive to discover in what ways former Gaelic-medium students in such diverse contexts engage with the language today, if at all.

Sources

Fishman, J. 1991. Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters).

Fishman, J. 2001. Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? Reversing Language Shift Revisited: A 21st Century Perspective (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters).

MacKinnon, K. 2007. ‘Gaelic-medium Education 1985-2007’, Powerpoint presentation, available online: <http://www.cnag.org.uk/munghaidhlig/stats/> [accessed 10.2.2012].

Nettle, D., & S. Romaine 2000. Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Woolard, K. 2007. ‘Is There Linguistic Life after High School? Longitudinal Changes in the Bilingual Repertoire in Metropolitan Barcelona’, Language in Society, 40: 617– 648.

[Above is a guest post by Stuart Dumore.]

Stuart Dunmore is Soillse PhD Candidate in Celtic and Scottish Studies at The University of Edinburgh. The language-identity nexus has been central to his academic and research interests. His doctoral research on the Gaelic language is funded by the Soillse initiative, an inter-university network to enhance research capacity for the maintenance and revitalisation of Gaelic language and culture in Scotland.

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On socialism, liberalism, and neo-liberalism

By Chad Nilep on February 16, 2012

Back in January “Johnson”, the language blog from The Economist, featured a post on the (mis)use of the words socialist and liberal in American political discourse.

Socialism is not “the government should provide healthcare” or “the rich should be taxed more” nor any of the other watery social-democratic positions that the American right likes to demonise by calling them “socialist”…. An awful lot of Americans have only the flimsiest grasp of what socialism is. And that, in a country that sent tens of thousands of men to die fighting socialism, is frankly an insult to those dead soldiers’ memories.

Whereas socialism gets over-applied to various left-of-center positions, the meaning of liberal in contemporary US politics is almost the reverse of where it started. Johnson again:

Americans are liberal at heart…. And yet “liberal” is almost a pejorative in America, tainted as it is with associations to that demon-word, “socialist”. When people here own up to being liberals, they have to do it with a certain defiance.

I agree. As I wrote elsewhere:

The concept of liberalism, which may be defined in general terms as a political philosophy favoring individual liberty, equality, and capitalism (Hartz 1955), has a long history and deep effect on Anglo-American thought. For example, the assertion in the Declaration of Independence that all men (sic) are created equal and endowed with life and liberty by their creator echoes John Locke’s suggestion that no person in a state of nature “ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker” (Locke [1690] 2005:4).

Locke’s version of liberalism resembles in some ways what contemporary US political discourse labels libertarianism, another term the “Johnson” post tackles.

The relationship between liberalism and small-r republicanism can also be difficult to disentangle when analyzing US political discourse. Quoting myself once more:

The challenge of defining liberal and republican is exacerbated by the fact that, in everyday political parlance in the United States, these words are used in ways nearly opposite to their definitions in the philosophical tradition sketched here. The Republican party, for example, is generally more associated with individual liberty and unfettered capitalism – that is, liberalism – than is its rival, the Democratic party. In turn, those Democrats who identify as Liberal may support constraints on private interests and the state to protect minority interests against domination, a view associated with republicanism.

(On reflection, I should add that many, though not all so-called “socially liberal” positions on civil rights, abortion, sexuality and the like are indeed liberal in Locke’s sense. This may be due to historical accident, however.)

To this list of confusing terms I would like to add one more: neo-liberalism.

Neoliberalism is a hot topic in contemporary anthropology. Anthrosource shows more than 170 papers treating the topic between 2001 and 2011. Most of these — at least, most that I have read — are excellent, insightful analyses of the ways that discourses of “freedom” and “individuality” erase structural issues in a range of contemporary settings and may exacerbate inequalities and the social problems that result from them.

As with any trending topic, however, there are inevitably a few authors who feel pressured to fit their own analyses to the currently popular discourses. My own reflections on “liberalism”, in fact, were partially inspired by suggestions that I should engage more with “neoliberalism”.

As I said, there is much excellent and necessary work being written on neoliberalism as well as globalization and late modernity. But there is also some vague hand-waving in which the terms simply seem to mean “the way things are around me” without sufficient attempt to explain what that way is like.

In my experience, one way to spot the best work is to look for authors who take pains to define these terms. This is generally true in scholarly writing, but especially so as a topic or a term becomes widely used.  If “neoliberalism” is everything in contemporary societies, then it is nothing specific in an analysis. But if an analyst works to limit terms to specific (albeit sometimes nebulous) sets of practices and ideas, I generally find their work more insightful and more satisfying.

Related: Refreshingly careful definitions of “Socialism”

Cited references

Hartz, Louis (1955). The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution. New York: Harcourt.

Locke, John (2005). Second Treatise of Government. Project Gutenberg.

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